Maybe it’s going to all girl boarding school, or maybe it’s being from a female-dominated family, but either way, I’m all about the ladies.

That said, in just under six weeks, when I marry my fiance, that’s probably the expiration date on ‘hoes over bros’.

Once you’re married you’re supposed to put your husband first. You’re a team. And while that doesn’t mean telling all your gals to get f*cked, it does, I’m told, change your friendships.

The silver lining to this scary prospect (which I fully intend to fight against) is the hen party.

Once upon a time, a hen party was a trip to a wine bar with a couple of friends and maybe a curry.

Then we started copying America, where everything is bigger and shinier, and hen nights became hen weekends or hen days.

Hen parties are a touchy subject for some. I can see why. They’re expensive, even if everyone makes an effort to keep costs down they still add up, especially if you’re going on more than one. There’s a time in your life where you have a Hen invitation every weekend between March and October and you can easily end up spending several grand on celebrating other people’s happiness.

Gals on tour. (Picture: F McDonald)

I’ll admit, there is something a little selfish about inviting your friends to organise a weekend for you and then spend it making a fuss of you. But there’s also something truly magical about it.

I looked around the room on Saturday night, where a group of women who didn’t know each other were putting temporary penis tattoos on each other’s faces and pretending a stripper wasn’t about to arrive. In that moment I realised that I was in the middle of a celebration of what it is to be female.

The closeness of female friendship, the immediate bond, the sharing of clothes and make-up. The laughing, the silliness, the bed sharing. All of it is pure magic, and most of it is exclusive to groups of girls.

A hen weekend is, to all intents and purposes, the sleepovers you had when you were a kid, only instead of getting hyper on sugar you get pissed on Prosecco, and rather than calling boys and hanging up you find yourself rubbing olive oil into the chest of a nice man wearing nothing but a police hat.

Sleepovers fizzle out as we get older. Hen weekends are some of the only times when we get to carve out space to get away from our partners and our real lives, and reconnect with the women we love.

A bit like a friendship bootcamp, a hen weekend lets you fully immerse yourself in what it is that you love about the women in your life. No-one is worried about getting the last train back to where they live, or getting up for work the next morning.

It’s so easy to put our friends and their needs on a back burner, to squeeze in a glass a wine between work and going home to watch MasterChef. But going away for the weekend is the antidote to that problem. It’s not just an investment of money, it’s an investment of time, which is infinitely more valuable.

Not a happy bunny. (Picture: K Tomolis)

Going on someone’s hen weekend (or day, or night) is a way of expressing your love for them. It’s a way of telling them that your friendship is important and valuable. It’s a commitment.

And when you’re going into a marriage, when you’re jumping into the unknown with no way of knowing how it’s going to change your life or your friendships, that investment is the most reassuring thing anyone could give you.

I came away from the weekend feeling closer to all of my friends than ever before, filled with love and admiration for these amazing women. My only sadness is that we exclusively tie these events to getting married.